"all the uncondemned Class A war criminals were set free by Gen. MacArthur in 1947 and 1948. Most of them immediately returned to the Japanese political arena, which was again dominated by the same Fascists and militarists though clad in democratic cloak in disguise."

"All Killers of "Human Experimentation" At Large. "

"Hundreds of doctors of the former Unit 731 are still practicing or living in retirement in Japan today. "

The Beginning, of the Tokyo Trial. About half a year after the opening of the Nuremberg Trail, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East began its trial of 28 Class A Japanese war criminals at Tokyo on May 3, 1946, which is known as the "Tokyo Trial." The hearings of the Trial dated back to 1928, when Marshal Chang Tsolin, warlord of Manchuria, was assassinated, and extended right to the Japanese surrender.

The background of the Tokyo Trial was somewhat different from that of the Nuremberg Trial. At the Cairo Conference, the three Allies, Britain, China, and the United States, issued a declaration on December 1, 1943, which spelled out that "the purpose of this war is to stop and punish Japanese aggression." The 5th article of the Potsdam Declaration of July 1945 issued by the same three Allies enunciated that "stem justice shall be meted out to all war criminals including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners." In the Instrument of Japanese Surrender of September 2, 1945, all matters related to the arrest and treatment of war criminals were specifically stipulated. In the meantime, the Commission of Crimes of the United Nations (established at London in the summer of 1943) made recommendation on the establishment of an international n-military tribunal for Japanese crimes and atrocities. U.S. State Department adopted the "Policy of Arrest and Punishment of War Criminals in the Far East," with which it notified the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP) and 8 nations (Australia, Britain, Canada, China, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, and the United States) to organize the tribunal. The Moscow Conference of foreign ministers of the big four, Britain, China, the Soviet Union and U.S. decided the tribunal would be established at Tokyo. In January 1946, General Douglas MacArthur approved its charter to formally inaugurate the Tribunal. Although the United States played a major role in both the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, having had her legal views and opinions well pronounced, she virtually dominated the latter, in which her policy toward Japan took precedence. The Tokyo Trial also was overshadowed by the Chinese civil war and the imminent Cold War that engulfed the American-Soviet relations. All this led to the Trial of the Class A war criminals unfinished and a hasty close of the Trial.

Nevertheless, the Tokyo Trial was based upon the concepts of war crimes initiated at the Nuremberg Trial, i.e., Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity, and War Crimes and Aggressive War--but without the "collective guilt" as with the crimes of the Nazis. Each member of the I 1 -nation Far East Council, supposed to be a guiding and policy-making organ for the SCAP, appointed a judge each, with Sir William F. Webb of Australia as presiding judge, the other judges being E. Stuart McDougall for Canada, Ju-ao Mei for China, Henri Bernard for France, Delfin Jaranilla for the Philippines, Bernard Victor A. Roling for the Netherlands, Erima Harvey Northeroft for New Zealand, I.M. Zaryanov for the Soviet Union, Lord Patrick for Great Britain, and John P. Higgins for the U.S. (later replaced by Maj. Gen. Myron C. Gramer), and R.M. Pal for India. The chief prosecutor was American Joseph B. Keenan, each of the I 11 nations appointed an associate prosecutor, the Chinese prosecutor being che-chun Hsiang.

Japan then was under U.S. occupation and the U.S. provided for funds and manpower for the Trial; as a result, the U.S. assumed the entire work of prosecution. Still the biggest problem was that the Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur had the authority not only to select judges but "to reduce, but not to increase the sentences." Chief Prosecutor Keenan, a politician from the State of Ohio, cooperated slavishly with the Supreme Commander; under such circumstances, the Tokyo Trail dragged for two and a half years and closed on November 4, 1948, with its sentences meted out to the 28 Class A war criminals as tabulated below.

Seven death sentences:

Hideki Tojo: Gendarme Commander and Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army; Minister of the Army and Prime Minister (October 1941 to July 1944), launching the Pearl Harbor attack.

Kenji Doihara: Chief of Special Service of the Kwantung Army; one of the conspirators engineering the "September 18, 193 1 " Incident and kidnapping the "last emperor" of the Manchu dynasty with whom to inaugurate Manchukuo.

Seishiro Itagaki: One of the conspirators to engineer the "September 18, 193 1 " Incident, Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army, and Minister of the Army.

lwane Matsui: Chief of Special Service of the Kwantung Army at Harbin, Commander-in-Chief of Japanese Central China Army, chief culprit of the Rape of Nanking.

Akira Muto: Deputy Chief of Staff of Japanese Central China Army, responsible for the Rape of Nanking and atrocities in Indonesia.

Heitaro Kimura: Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army, deputy minister of the Army, army commander in Bunna, where he was responsible for the brutalization of Allied POWs especially to build the Siain-Bunna Railway.

Koki Hirota: As Foreign Minster, he introduced the "three principles" in dealing with China in 1935. Next year he became Prime Minister; he was the only civilian to receive death sentence.

Sixteen defendants sentenced to life imprisonment: Sadao Araki: Minister of the Army, Minister of Education, and leader of the "Imperial Way Faction."

Kingoro Hashimoto: As an artillery regiment commander, Colonel Hashimoto was a major culprit in

the Rape of Nanking,. He was behind assassinations and coups d'etat and published books for racist propaganda.

Shunroku Hata: Field Marshal, Commander-in-Chief of Japanese expeditionary army in China, Minister of the Army.

Yoshijlro Umezu: Commander-in-Chief of Japanese Army stationed in North China and later of the

Kwantung Army; Chief of General Staff representing Japan to sign the Instrument of Surrender on the USS Missouri.

Koichi Kido, Marquis: Minister of Education, Welfare, Home Affairs in various periods, and Lord Keeper of the Privy Council.

Kuniaki Koiso: Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army, Governor of Korea then known as "Tiger of Korea," and Prime Minister.

Kichiro Hiranuma: Founder of the Kokuhonsha (society for national quintessence), Prime Minister, and President of the Privy Council.

Jiro Minanii: Commander-in-Chief of the Kwantung Army, Minister of the Army, Governor of Korea, and an early leader advocating the "Holy War" against China.

Takasumi Oka: Chief of Bureau of Military Affairs; Deputy Minister of the Navy; he was most responsible for the mistreatment of Allied POWs especially the "hellships."

Okinori Kaya: President of North China Development Company, plundering China's industry and resources; Minister of Finance with the knowledge of building the Siam-Burma Railway with POWs as slave laborers.

Naoki Hoshino: Chief of financial affairs in Manchuria; as chief cabinet secretary, being the war's most enthusiastic supporter in the cabinet, drafted the declarations of war against Britain and the United States.

Hiroshi Oshima: Lt. Gen. and Ambassador to Germany being considered "more Nazi than the Nazis" forged the Axis Pact with Germany and Italy.

Kenryo Sato: A confidant of Premiere Tojo, serving as Chief of the Bureau of Military Affairs and divisional commander in Indonesia and Burma, persecuting the Allied POWs.

Shigetaro Shimada: Vice Chief of Naval General Staff-, as Minister of Navy, he authorized the Pearl Harbor attack.

Toshio Shiratofi: Ambassador to Italy, a rabid supporter of military expansion, being a confidant of Mussolini and having forged the Axis Pact.

Two defendants received prison terms:

Shigenori Togo: Ambassador to Germany and Italy; Foreign Minister, 1941-42, 1945, being responsible for negotiations with the U.S. before the Pearl Harbor attack, but inimical to Nazi Germany. He was sentenced 20 years of imprisonment.

Mamoru Shigemitsu: Ambassador to China, Britain, and the Soviet Union; Forel-n Minister, 1943- 45, representing Japan to sign the Instrument of Surrender on the USS Missouri.

As to the other three defendants, Matsuoka died in 1946, Nagano died in 1947, and Okawa was set free because of insanity. Shumei Okawa, a staunch nationalist devoted to militarism, had been Chief of East Asian Economic Survey Bureau and participated in the March and October coups of 193 1, and the "September 18" Incident. He was jailed for the assassination of Premiere Tsuyoshi Inukai in 1932. In the first day of the Tokyo Trial, when the indictments to the war criminals were announced, he beat the head of Tojo. All charged against him were dropped after the conclusion of the Tokyo Trial and he was discharged from the mental hospital as mentally fit; he died nine years later.

Field Marshal Osarni Nagano served as deputy naval attach in the Japanese Embassy at Washington, 1912-14 and became Minister of Navy in 1936. He was Chief of Naval General Staff from 1941 to 1944, planning the Pearl Harbor attack; died of natural cause during the Trial.

Yosuke Matsuoka came to America for study at the age of 14 and was graduated from Oregon University in 1900. He began his diplomatic career in 1904, first serving as consul at Shanghai. In 1927, he became Vice-President of the Southern Manchuria Railway Company and a rabid supporter for the annexation of Manchuria to Japan, by initiating the theory that "Man (Manchuria)-Mon (Inner Mongolia) is the Lifeline of Japan." In 1932, he became Chief of the Japanese Delegation to the League of Nations and in March of next year, he led the Japanese Delegation to withdraw from the League on account of the League's resolution that Japan was an aggressor for invading Manchuria. Upon returning to Japan, he was hailed as a hero for his defiance to the League and soon rewarded with the presidency of the Southern Manchurian Railway Company. In 1940, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs championing the Japanese-German alliance and the "Greater East-Asian Co-prosperity Order." Having reached a Rapprochement with Moscow by signing the treaty of neutrality in April 194 1, he advocated joining forces with Germany to attack the Soviet Union two months later, when Hitler launched the Barbarossa campaign to invade Russia. He died in a Tokyo hospital in 1946.

The Majority of Class A War Criminals Not Tried but Released. Most regrettably was the fact that, of the 70 Japanese apprehended for Class A war criminals, only the first group of 28 people were brought to trial, the rest which was divided into the 2nd and 3rd groups awaited to be tried in Sugamo prison of Tokyo. The International Prosecution Section of the SCAP, then realizing the magnitude of their crimes and the multitude of cases, decided to try the apprehended seventy in three groups, the first group of 28 war criminals all being major leaders in military, political, and diplomatic sphere. The 2nd group of 23 war criminals and the 3rd group of 19 war criminals were notorious, industrial and financial magnates, warmongers engaged in ammunition trade and trafficking in drugs, as well as some less known, but equally rabid, barbaric leaders in military, political, and diplomatic spheres. Notably among them were:

Nobusuke Kishi: Taking charge of industry and commerce of Manchukuo, 1936-40; Minister of Industry and Commerce under Tojo administration; and Prime Minister of Japan, 1957-60, having advocated revision of the new constitution to enlarge the Emperor's authority and curb the Diet's power.

Yoshisuke Ayukawa: Sworn-brother of Fusanosuke Kuhara, founder of Japan Industrial Corporation; having gone to Manchuria after the "September 18" Incident, where he founded the Manchurian Heavy Industry Development Company to dominate industry and mining of Manchuria.

Toshizo Nishio: Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army, Commander-in-Chief of China Expeditionary Army, 1939-41; and Minister of Education.

Yoshio Kodama: Radical nationalist behind many coups and assassinations in the 1930s; setting up the Kodama special organ in occupied China engaged in exploiting Chinese resources- and after the war, remaining a major leader of Japanese underworld society.

Kazuo Aoki: Administrator of Manchurian affairs; Minister of Treasury in Nobuyoki Abe's cabinet and then following Abe to China as advisor; Minister of Greater East-Asian Ministry under Tojo.

Masayoki Tani: Ambassador to Manchukuo, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Concurrently Director of Intelligence Bureau; Ambassador to the Nanking puppet government; and after the war Ambassador to the United States.

Eiji Amo: As Chief of Intelligence Section of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amo issued the "Amo Statement" in 1934, calling upon Western powers not to render assistance to China as the East Asian order was very much the Japanese responsibility; Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs; and Director of Intelligence Bureau in Tojo's cabinet.

Yakijiro Suma: As Consul General at Nanking, Suma was well known to the Chinese owing to his concocting many intrigue, particularly on the eve of the war; in 1938, he served at counselor at the Japanese Embassy at Washington; and after 1941, Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain.

Ryoichi Sasakawa: One of the leading Fascists and Militarists of Japan organized his private army of 15,000 men equipped with 20 warplanes and dressed in black shirt to emulate that of Mussolini, his idol after "September 18, 193 1 " Incident. Following the outbreak of the Pacific War, his army massacred thousands of innocent Chinese and Malayans for which he earned the name of "Tiger of Malaya." After the war, he kept his Mafia business in Japan involving drug trafficking, pornographic enterprises, gambling, and usury that made him the super rich, with which he had become the leading philanthropist of the world; he showered handsome donations to the United Nations, President Carter's Library, and one million dollars each to the leading universities of America.

Moreover all the uncondemned Class A war criminals were set free by Gen. MacArthur in 1947 and 1948. Most of them immediately returned to the Japanese political arena, which was again dominated by the same Fascists and militarists though clad in democratic cloak in disguise. Despite a western-style, democratic Japanese Constitution which MacArthur helped to adopt, Japanese political leaders, unlike their counterparts of West Germany, have run counter to the original promises and inclinations. totally ignoring their legal and moral obligations and responsibilities as a defeated nation, as they have pursued the policy of "Three Nos," no admission of aggression, no repentance and apology, and no compensations to their victims.

"No. One War Criminal" Not Brought to Trial. In both Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, No. One war criminal was not brought to trial. Undoubtedly, had Hitler lived, he would have been brought to Trial, condemned and hanged as had other eleven Nazi leaders. Ironically, the Emperor's palace was just nearby the site where the Trial took place, but Hirohito, the No. One war criminal was free from being tried, a fact that has intolerably reduced the value of the Tokyo Trial. Before the end of the war, Australia and China had accentuated the necessity of trying the chief culprit Emperor Hirohito, but for the sake of expediency of governing Japan under occupation, the U.S. eventually took off Hirohito from the list of war criminals. Throughout the Trial, the issue of bringing Hirohito to Trial had frequently loomed up. While the debate over whether he should have stood to defend himself or as witness for other defendants had annoyed the postwar Japanese society.

Concerning the issue of the stealthy attack on Pearl Harbor, both Naval Chief of General Staff and Prime Minister Tojo admitted having consulted with Emperor Hirohito, at which Tojo expressed confidence in the result. Then the Presiding Judge Webb commented: "The Emperor then directed that the program be carried out. . . It will remain that the men who advised the commission of a crime, if it be one, are in no worse position than the man who directs the crime be committed." In spite of much he tried to defend Hirohito's innocence, Tojo was obliged to confess that "the Emperor had consented, though reluctantly, to the war" and that "none of us would dare act against the Emperor's will."

From the documents of the General Headquarters of the Army and Navy released by the Japan Defense Administration after the war, some logical conclusions can be easily drawn as follows: (1) All major campaigns, such as those of "August 13" of Shanghai, Wuhan, Changsha, Burma, and "Ichigo" had been meticulously studied by Hirohito before he ordered them to be carried out with his blessings; (2) the appointment or dismissal of a division commander (a division usually having the strength of 16,000 to 22,500 men) must have had the approval of Emperor Hirohito and, more often than not, he would have an audience with the appointee before being announced; and (3) any maneuver of troops above the divisional level and a new division being established had to have his approval. By all accounts, his authority over the army and navy was doubtless greater than Hitler's.

Hirohito's authority was clearly instanced by the following episode. After the Midway debacle on June 5, 1942 (the great loss of the Japanese navy has not been quite appreciated by Western scholars), Japan immediately shifted its strategy in the Pacific from offensive to defensive. In August 1942, U.S. forces launched an offensive, thus unfolding the four-month sanguinary jungle battle for Guadalcanal. For lack of coordination and deficient estimate of U.S. strength, the lives of over 20,000 Japanese soldiers were in jeopardy. Then the Japanese General Headquarters sent its chief of war operation section, Colonel Hattori, to Guadalcanal for an on-the-spot investigation. Hattori flew back to Tokyo on November 1 1, and was received by Emperor Hirohito the next day to present his detailed written report, during which Hirohito said: "As a large U.S. fleet was pressing on Guadalcanal, whether the Army should send reinforcement of its own air force without delay." Afterwards, the Army dispatched its air force to the Southeast Pacific theater but it was too late to save the Japanese army on Guadalcanal. As for the withdrawal of Japanese army from Quadalcanal, Emperor Hirohito on November 28, 1942 issued Ns order saying:

Today the Chief of General Headquarters said that whether or not we withdraw from Guadalcanal will be reported to me on the 30th. I am not satisfied with this kind of as a matter of factly report, but rather I wish to know what is the plan for defeating the enemy. The situation is so serious that the General Hqs. conference should be summoned to discuss the issue. Regardless of the date whether it be the end or the beginning of the year, I will be there. (Important Records of the Japanese Army Warring in China, Tr. Taipei, Bureau of Military History, Defense Ministry, 1992, Vol. 23).

The Imperial Conference was held in Emperor's palace on December 31 to decide the withdrawal from Guadalcanal with Emperor Hirohito presiding. From this, one should not fail to see that Emperor Hirohito was indeed the Conirnander-in-Chief of the Japanese Armed Forces. In fact, why the Japanese surrender procrastinated so long as it did until August 15, 1945, it was chiefly due to Hirohito's dictatorship. A few years ago, a courageous Japanese writer Hisashi Inoue wrote:

In February 1945, for example, as Japan was losing on Asian and Pacific battlefields, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, former prime minister and Imperial counselor, wrote the ruler: 'I believe that defeat, although tragic and regrettable, is inevitable' and urged him to accept the premise of defeat.

Ignoring this plea, Emperor Showa made a tragic mistake. Had he agreed then to a ceasefire, Tokyo would have been spared the air raid of March 10, 1945, when incendiary bombs leveled much of the capital, killing 100,000 people. The U.S. invasion of Okinawa which cost about 260,000 Japanese lives and 50,000 American casualties, would have been avoided. Atomic bombs would not have obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sparing another 200,000 lives. (The Japan Times Weekly, September 24-30, 1990.)

So that Emperor Hirohito must be held responsible for the deaths of 3 million Japanese, 35 million Chinese, 109,656 Americans, and many million Asian, his guilt was apparently greater than that of Hitler. How can one imagine that this No. One war criminal Kirohito was not brought to justice, as he was allowed to live a full life; when he died in 1989, he was buried with the most pompous funeral of the century. This alone showed the grave failure of the Tokyo Trial and that the sacrifices of Chinese, Japanese, Americans, and Asians were nearly in vain; for this, their souls cannot rest in peace!

All Killers of "Human Experimentation" At Large. Another colossal mistake the Tokyo Trial made was that the U.S. government and Supreme Commander MacArthur struck a deal with Lt. Gen. Ishii Shiro, former commander of Japanese biological warfare Unit 73 1, that he and all members of Unit 731 were to be exonerated from war crimes in exchange for data they had acquired through human experimentation of many thousands of Chinese, Koreans, Soviets, and even U.S. POWs. Without a shadow of doubt, Ishii's crimes had far exceeded those committed by the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele for conducting human experiments, while Unit 731 had murdered the people many times the number of Jews, Gypsies, Polish, and Russians killed by the Nazi doctors!

Before the "Doctors' Trial" at Nuremberg formally began on December 9, 1946, there were 31 secondary war criminals for having conducted human experimentation that were tried at Buchwald, Germany, where many kinds of human experiments took place, and 22 of them were sentenced to death. The "Doctors' Trial" had convicted 16 out of 23 war criminals originally indicted: death sentences to 7 people including Hitler's personal doctor Karl Brandt; 5 life imprisonment; 2 twenty years term-n imprisonment; I twenty and ten years' term each.

Importantly, the I 0-article Nuremberg Code adopted by the "Doctors' Trial has been taken in total by the United Nations and Western countries. Its first article reads: "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential"; article 4: "The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury"; article 9: "During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible." Hence members of Unit 731 violated not only the Nuremberg code but also the 1925 Geneva Convention which outlaws the use of chemical and biological warfares and of which Japan is a signatory country.

Hundreds of doctors of the former Unit 731 are still practicing or living in retirement in Japan today. We earnestly hope that in their lifetime they could come to terms with the horrendous atrocities they had continued by pleading for forgiveness and making apology to their victims and their bereaved families as well as preparing to pay them fair monetary compensations. In so doing, not only can their souls be saved; in the meantime, they make the least contributions to their posterity and human society, while preserving history and maintaining truth and justice. Otherwise, their victims and families, basing on international laws and resolutions of the United Nations and backed up by millions of Chinese, Asians, and peace-loving people of the world, would take their case to the Japanese and international courts so as to attest that law and morality does exist in the human world.

Live dissection of American POWs When and where How they died The sentence MacArthur let the mudrerers go free

UKUOKA, Japan "I could never again wear a white smock," says Dr. Toshio Tono, dressed in a white running jacket at his hospital and recalling events of 50 years ago. "It's because the prisoners thought that we were doctors, since they could see the white smocks, that they didn't struggle. They never dreamed they would be dissected."

The prisoners were eight American airmen, knocked out of the sky over southern Japan during the waning months of World War U, and then torn apart organ by organ while they were still alive.

What occurred here 50 years ago this month, at the anatomy department of Kyushu University, has been largely forgotten in Japan and is virtually unknown in the United States. American prisoners of war were subjected to horrific medical experiments. All of the prisoners died. Most of the physicians and asistants then did their best to hide the evidence of what they had done.

Fukuoka is midway between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities that are planning elaborate ceremonies to mark the devastation caused by the United States'dropping the first atomic bombs. But neither Fukuoka nor the university plans to mark its own moment of infamy.

The gruesome experiments performed at the university were variations on research programs Japan conducted in territories it occupied during the war. In the most notorious of these efforts, the Japanese Imperial Army's Unit 731 killed thousands of Chinese and Russians held prisoner in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, in experiments to develop chemical and biological weapons.

Ken Yuasa, now a frail, 70-year-old physician in Tokyo, belonged to a military company stationed just south of Unit 731's base at Harbin, Manchuria. He recalls joining other doctors to watch as a prisoner was shot in the stomach, to give Japanese surgeons practice at extracting bullets.

While the victim was still alive, the doctors also practiced amputations.

"It wasn't just my experience," Yuasa says. "It was done everywhere."

Kyushu University stands out as the only site where Americans were incontrovertibly used in dissections and the only known site where experiments were done in Japan.

On May 5, 1945, an American B-29 bomber was flying with a dozen other aircraft after bombing Tachiaral Air Base in southwestern Japan and beginning the return flight to the island fortress of Guam.

Kinzou Kasuya, a 19-year-old Japanese pilot flying one of the Japanese fighters in pursuit of the Americans, rammed his aircraft into the fuselage of the B-29, destroying both planes.

No one knows for certain how many Americans were in the B-29; its crew had been hastily assembled on Guam. But villagers in Japan who witnessed the collision in the air saw about a dozen parachutes blossom.

One of the Americans died when the cords of his, parachute were severed by another Japanese plane. A second was alive when he reached the ground. He shot all but his last bullet at the villagers coming toward him, then used the last on himself.

Two others were quickly stabbed or shot to death.

At least nine were taken into custody.

B-29 crews were despised for the grim results of their raids. So some of the captives were beaten.

The local authorities assumed that the most knowledgeable was the captain, Marvin Watkins. He was sent to Tokyo for interrogation, where was tortured but nonetheless survived the war.

Every available account asserts that a military physician and a colonel in a local regiment were the two key figures in what happened next. What happened cannot be easily explained. Perhaps caring for the Americans was an impossible burden, especially because some were injured. Perhaps food was scarce.

Whatever the reason, the colonel and doctor decided to make the prisoners available for medical experiments, and Kyushu University became a willing participant.

Teddy Ponczka was the first to be handed over to the doctors and their assistants. He had already been stabbed, in either his right shoulder or his chest. According to Tono, the American assumed he was about to be treated for the wound when he was taken to an operating room.

But the incision went far deeper. A doctor wanted to test surgery's effects on the respiratory system, so one lung was removed. The wound was stitched closed.

How Teddy Ponczka died is in dispute. According to U.S. military records, he was anesthetized during the operation, and then the gas mask was removed from his face. A surgeon, Taro Torisu, reopened the incision and reached into Ponczka's chest. In the bland words of the military report, Torisu "stopped the heart action."

Tono remembers events differently. The first experiment was followed by a second, he says. Ponczka was given intravenous injections of sea water, to determine if sea water could be used as a substitute for sterile saline solution, used to increase blood volume in the wounded or those in'shock. Tono held the bottle of sea water. He says Ponczka bled to death.

Then it was the turn of the others.

The Japanese wanted to learn whether a patient could survive the partial loss of his liver. They wanted to learn if epilepsy could be controlled by removing part of the brain. According to U.S. military records, physicians also operated on -the prisoners' stomachs and necks.

All the Americans died.

"There was no debate among the doctors about whether to do the operations - that is what made it so strange," Tono says.

Word of the experiments eventually leaked out.

Thirty people were brought to trial by an Allied war crimes tribunal in Yokohama, Japan, on March 11, 1948. Charges included vivisection, wrongful removal of body parts and cannibalism - based on reports that the experimenters had eaten the livers of the Americans.

Of the 30 defendants, 23 were found guilty of various charges. (For lack of proof, the charges of cannibalism had been dismissed.) Five of the guilty were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment. The other 14 were sentenced to shorter terms.

But the attitude of the American occupation forces began to change largely because of the start of the Korean War in June 1950. The United States had less interest in punishing Japan, an enemy-turned-ally.

In September 1950, U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, as supreme commander for Allied Forces, reduced most of the sentences. By 1958, all those convicted were free. None of the death sentences was carried out.

Vivisection of humans without anesthetic The reason for the vivisection Who did the experiments Why none of them was prosecuted The origin of the germ war experiments Japanese germ war against China Knowledge gained at the cost of human lives Experiments on infants The scope of human experimantation Plans to take the germ war to US Plans dropped in fear of US revengence The murders show little remorse today Will it happen again?

Morioka, Japan He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to abed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic.

"The fellow knew that it was over for him and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied, him down," recalled the 72-year-old farmer, then a medical assistant in a Japanese army unit in China in World War II. "But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming.

"I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time."

Finally, the old man, who insisted on anonymity, explained the reason for the vivisection: The prisoner, who was Chinese, had been deliberately infected with the plague, as part of a research project, the full horror of which is only now emerging, to develop plague bombs for use in World War II. After infecting him, the researchers decided to cut him open to see what the disease does to a man's inside.

"That research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II: a vast project to develop weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax, cholera and a dozen other pathogens. unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army conducted research by experimenting on humans and by "field testing" plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start plague outbreaks. They could.

A trickle of information about the germ warfare program has turned into a stream and now a torrent. Half a century after the end of the war, a rush of books, documentaries and exhibitions are unlocking the past and helping arouse interest in Japan in the atrocities committed by some of Japan's most distinguished doctors.

Scholars and former members of the unit say that at least 3000 people and by some accounts several times that number were killed in the medical experiments; none survived. No one knows how many died in the "field testing"

It is becoming evident that the Japanese officers in charge of the program hoped to use their weapons against the United States. They proposed using balloon bombs to carry disease to America and they had a plan in the summer of 1945 to use kamikaze pilots to dump plague infected fleas on San Diego.

The research was kept secret after the end of World War II in part because the U.S. Army granted immunity from war crimes prosecution to the doctors in exchange for their research data. Japanese and U.S. documents show that the United States helped cover up the human experimentation and instead of putting the ringleaders on trial, it gave them stipends.

The accounts now emerging are wrenching to read even after so much time has passed: a Russian mother and daughter reportedly left in a gas chamber, for example, as doctors peer through the thick glass and time their convulsions, watching as the woman sprawls over her child in a futile effort to save her from the gas.

The origin of Germ warfare

Japan's biological weapons program was born in the 1930s, in part because Japanese officials were impressed that germ warfare had been banned by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. If it was so awful that it had to be banned under international law, the officers reasoned, it must make a great weapon.

The Japanese army, which was then occupying a large chunk of China, evicted the residents of eight villages near the city of Harbin in Manchuria to make way for the headquarters of Unit 731. One advantage of China, from the Japanese point of view, was the availability of research subjects on whom germs could be tested. The subjects were called marutas. or logs, and most were Communist sympathizers or ordinary criminals. The majority were Chinese, but there were also many Russian expatriates living in China.

Takeo Wane, 71, a former medical worker in Unit 731 who now lives in the northern Japanese city of Morioka, said he once saw a 6-foot high glass jar in which 3 Western man was pickled in formaldehyde. The man had been cut into two pieces, vertically, and Wane guesses that he was a Russian because there were many Russians then living in the area.

The Unit 731 headquarters contained many other such jars with specimens. They contained feet, heads, internal organs, all neatly labeled.

"I saw samples with labels saying 'American,' 'English' and 'Frenchman,' but most were Chinese, Koreans and Mongolians" said a Unit 731 veteran who insisted on anonymity.

Medical researchers also locked up diseased prisoners with healthy ones, to see how readily various ailments would spread. The doctors locked others inside a pressure chamber to see how much the body can withstand before the eyes pop from their sockets.

Victims were often taken to a proving ground called Anda, where they were tied to stakes in a pattern and then bombarded with test weapons to see how effective the new technologies were. Planes sprayed the zone with a plague culture or dropped bombs with plague-infested fleas to see how many people and at what distance from the center would die.

The Japanese army regularly conducted field tests to see whether biological warfare would work outside the laboratory. Planes dropped plague-infected fleas over Ningbo in eastern China and over Changde in north-central China and plague outbreaks were later reported.

Japanese troops also dropped cholera and typhoid cultures in wells and ponds, but the results were often counterproductive. In 1942, germ warfare specialists distributed dysentery, cholera and typhoid in Zhejiang Province in China. but Japanese soldiers themselves became ill and 1,700 died of the diseases, scholars say.

Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University, in Northridge, estimates that more than 200,000 Chinese were killed in germ warfare field experiments. Hams -author ofa book on Unit 731, "Factories of Death" also says that plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused outbreaks of the plague that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 through 1948.

The leading scholar of Unit 731 in Japan, Keiichi Tsuneishi, is skeptical of such numbers. Tsuneishi, who has led the efforts in Japan to uncover atrocities by Unit 731, says that the attack on Ningbo killed about 100 people and that there is no evidence for huge outbreaks of disease set off by field trials.

Knowledge gained at the cost of human lives

Many of the human experiments were intended to develop new vaccines or treatments for medical problems the Japanese army faced. Many experiments remain secret, but an 18-page report prepared in 1945--and kept by a senior Japanese military officer until now--includes a summary of the unit's research. The report was prepared in English for U.S. intelligence officials and it shows the extraordinary range of the unit's work.

There are scores of categories that describe research about which nothing is known. It is unclear what the prisoners had to endure for entries like "studies of burn scar" and "study of bullets lodged in the brains."

Scholars say that the research was not contrived by mad scientists and that it was intelligently designed and' carried out. The medical findings saved many Japanese lives.

For example, Unit 731 proved that the best treatment for frostbite was not rubbing the Limb, which had been the traditional method but immersion in water a bit warmer than 100 degrees, but never more than 122 degrees.

The cost of this scientific breakthrough was borne by those seized for medical experiments. They were taken outside and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water, until a guard decided that frostbite had set in. Testimony From a Japanese officer said this was determined after the "frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck."

A booklet just published in Japan after a major exhibition about Unit 731 shows how doctors even experimented on a three-day-old baby, measuring the temperature with a needle stuck inside the infant's middle finger.

"Usually a hand of a three-day-old infant is clenched into a fist", the booklet says, "but by sticking the needle in, the middle finger could be kept straight to make the experiment easier".

The Scope of Human experimentation

The human experimentation did not take place just in Unit 731, nor was it a rogue unit acting on its own. While it is unclear whether Emperor Hirohito knew of the atrocities, his younger brother, Prince Mikasa, toured Unit 731's headquarters in China and wrote in his memoirs that he was shown films showing how Chinese prisoners were "made to march on the plains of Manchuria for poison gas experiments on humans."

In addition, the recollections of Dr. Ken Yuasa, 78, who still practices in a clinic in Tokyo, suggest that human experimentation may have been routine even outside Unit 731. Dr. Yuasa was an army medic in China, but he says he was never in Unit 731 and never had contact with it.

Nevertheless. Dr. Yuasa says that when he was still in medical school In Japan, the students heard that ordinary doctors who went to China were allowed to vivisect patients. And sure enough, when Dr. Yuasa arrived in Shanxi Province in northcentral China in 1942, he was soon asked to attend a "practice surgery."

Two Chinese men were brought in, stripped naked and given general anesthetic. Then Dr. Yuasa and the others began practicing various kinds of surgery: first an appendectomy, then an amputation of an arm and finally a tracheotomy. After 90 minutes, they were finished, so they killed the patient with an injection.

When Dr. Yuasa was put in charge of a clinic, he said, he periodically asked the police for a Communist to dissect, and they sent one over. The vivisection was all for practice rather than for research, and Dr. Yuasa says they were routine among Japanese doctors working in China in the war.

In addition, Dr. Yuasa - who is now deeply apologetic about what he did said he cultivated typhoid germs in test tubes and passed them on, as he had been instructed to do, to another army unit. Someone from that unit, which also had no connection with Unit 731, later told him that the troops would use the test tubes to infect the wells of villages in Communist-held territory.

Plans to take the germ war to the US homeland

In 1944, when Japan was nearing defeat, Tokyo's military planners seized on a remarkable way to hit back at the American heartland: they launched huge balloons that rode the prevailing winds to the continental United States. Although the American Government censored reports at the time, some 200 balloons landed in Western states, and bombs carried by the balloons killed a woman in Montana and six people in Oregon.

Half a century later, there is evidence that it could have been far worse; some Japanese generals proposed loading the balloons with weapons of biological warfare, to create epidemics of plague or anthrax In the United States. Other army units wanted to send cattleplague virus to wipe out the American livestock industry or grain smut to wipe out the crops.

There was a fierce debate in Tokyo, and a document discovered recently suggests that at a crucial meeting in late July 1944 it was Hideki Tojo - whom the United States later hanged for war crimes - who rejected the proposal to use germ warfare against the United States.

At the time of the meeting, Tojo had just been ousted as Prime Minister and chief of the General Staff, but he retained enough authority to veto the proposal. He knew by then that Japan was likely to lose the war, and he feared that biological assaults on the United States would invite retaliation with germ or chemical weapons being developed by America.

Yet the Japanese Army was apparently willing to use biological weapons against the Allies in some circumstances. When the United States prepared to attack the Pacific island of Saipan in the late spring of 1944, a submarine was sent from Japan to carry biological weapons it is unclear what kind - to the defenders.

The submarine was sunk, Professor Tsuneishi says, and the Japanese troops had to rely on conventional weapons alone.

As the end of the war approached In 1945, Unit 731 embarked on its wildest scheme of all. Codenamed Cherry Blossoms at Night, the plan was to use kamikaze pilots to infest California with the plague.

Toshimi Mizobuchi, who was an instructor for new recruits in Unit 731, said the idea was to use 20 of the 500 new troops who arrived in Harbin in July 1945. A submarine was to take a few of them to the seas off Southern California, and then they were to fly -in a plane carried on board the submarine and contaminate San Diego with plague-infected fleas. The target date was to be Sept. 22, 1945.

Ishio Obata, 73, who now lives in Ehime prefecture, acknowledged that he had been a chief of the Cherry Blossoms at Night attack force against San Diego, but he declined to discuss details. "It is such a terrible memory that I don't want to recall it," he said.

Tadao Ishimaru, also 73, said he had learned only after returning to Japan that he had been a candidate for the strike force against San Diego. "I don't want to think about Unit 731," he said in a brief telephone interview. "Fifty years have passed since the war. Please let me remain silent."

It Is unclear whether Cherry Blossoms at Night ever had a chance of being carried out. Japan did indeed have at least five submarines that carried two or three planes each, their wings folded against the fuselage like a bird.

But a Japanese Navy specialist said the navy would have never allowed Its finest equipment to be used for an army plan like Cherry Blossoms at Night, partly because the highest priority in the summer of 1945 was to defend the main Japanese islands, not to launch attacks on the United States mainland.

If the Cherry Blossoms at Night plan was ever serious, it became irrelevant as Japan prepared to sur-render in early August 1945. In the last days of the war, beginning on Aug. 9, Unit 731 used dynamite to try to destroy all evidence of its germ warfare program, scholars say.

No Punishment, Little Remorse

Partly because the Americans helped cover up the biological warfare program in exchange for its data, Gen. Shiro Ishii, the head of Unit 731, was allowed to live peacefully until his death from throat cancer in 1959. Those around him in Unit 731 saw their careers flourish in the postwar period, rising to positions that included Governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and head of the Japan Olympic Committee.

By conventional standards, few people were more cruel than the farmer who as a Unit 731 member carved up a Chinese prisoner without anesthetic, and who also acknowledged that he had helped poison rivers and wells. Yet his main intention in agreeing to an interview seemed to be to explain that Unit 731 was not really so brutal after all.

Asked why he had not anesthetized the prisoner before dissecting him, the farmer explained: "Vivisection should be done under normal circumstances. If we'd used anesthesia, that might have affected the body organs and blood vessels that we were examining. So we couldn't have used anesthetic."

When the topic of children came up, the farmer offered another justification: "Of course there were experiments on children. But probably their fathers were spies."

"There's a possibility this could happen again," the old man said, smiling genially. "Because in a war, you have to win."

A Preliminary Review of Studies of Japanese Biological Warfare Unit 731 in the United States

Introduction

In the midst of continuous denial by important members of the Japanese government individually or collectively that Japan was an aggressor in World War II, the planned exhibition of the Smithsonian Institute to commemorate the end of WWII in Asia has turned into an unusually fervid debate, with which an interest in discussing and writing on Japan's wartime atrocities has been aroused. Most prominent among numerous writings on the subject is "Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity" penned by Nicholas D. Kristof and published in New York Times on March 17, 1995. The article has given us a detailed account of the most shocking, heinous, cruel crime the civilized world has ever known: Japanese Unit 731 used human beings for vivisection in order to develop biological weapons. Equally unbelievable is that the United States has covered up the crime in exchange for the data on human experiments, an act utterly ignoring international laws and human justice. What a great irony to the lofty ideal of democracy and the so-called "American civilization" of the 20th century!

The shock created by Kristof's article has been felt primarily in the U.S. and a few Western countries. However, as early as 1949, the Soviet Union held a week long trial at Khabarovsk of the Japanese war criminals for biological warfare. Among those tried, 12 people were associated with 731, including General Yamada Otozo, Commander-in-Chief of the Kuantung Army, Lt. Gen. Ryuiji Kajitsuka, Chief of the Medical Administration, and Lt. Gen. Takaatsu Takahashi, Chief of the Veterinary Division, both in the Kuantung Army; Maj. Gen. Kiyoshi Kawashima, longtime head of Unit 731's production department; Maj. Gen. Shunji Sato, head of Unit 731's Canton branch; and Lt. Col. Toshihide Nishi, Major Tomio Karasawa, Maj. Maso Onoue, Lt. Zensaku Hirazakura, Senior Sergeant Kazuo Mitomo, Corporal Norimitsu Kikuchi, and Private Yuji Kurushima, all of Unit 731. The entire proceedings of the trial were published under the title "The Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons" by Foreign Language Publishing House, Moscow, 1950.

Since 1940, in Chinese theater, Ishii Shiro had led his Unit 731 to engage in biological warfare by attacking Ningpo, Chinhua, Chuchou of Chechiang province (during the Japanese-Soviet war at Nomonhan, Mongolia in the summer of 1939, Unit 731 was dispatched to the front to make bacterial assault). To retaliate the U.S. air raid of Tokyo led by Col. Doolittle in April 1942, from which over 60 U.S. airmen were rescued in Chechiang area, Japan launched a largescale mopping-up campaign, in which several hundred men from Unit 731 and its subsidiary Unit 1644 of Nanking took part. Early in November 1941, Unit 731 dispatched an airplane to spread bubonic plague at Changte, Hunan, which was verified by Dr. E. J. Bannon of American Presbyterian Church hospital at Changte. The event was well known to American and British intelligence agencies at Chungking and besides the Chinese government had fully informed the American and British government of it through its ambassadors Wellington Koo at London and Hu Shih at Washington.

Chinese authorities had long learned that Japan used biological warfare against China and had repeatedly appealed to international communities for help. Before making their escape at the time of Japanese surrender, Japanese in Unit 731 set free scores of thousands of infected rats that caused widespread plague in 22 counties of Heilungchiang and Kirin provinces that took more than 20,000 Chinese lives. As the plague was well publicized in newspapers and periodicals, many Chinese became aware of Japan's employing biological warfare in China during the war. While the Korean was raging, North Korea and China accused the United States of using biological warfare that rekindled the public interest in probing Unit 731. Among thousands of Japanese prisoners of war (POW) repatriated from Siberia, some belonged to Unit 73 1. Together with those Japanese POWs then detained in China, they were tried in a special court at Shenyang (Mukden) in June 1956. Strikingly one of them was Ken Yuasa, the doctor mentioned in Kristof's article in the New York Times. Some others under trial included important members of Unit 73 1: Major Hideo Sakakihara who was in charge of Hailar branch of Unit 731 (there were four branches under Unit 731: Hailer, Sunwu, Linkou, and Mutanchiang), Dr. Yataro Ueda, Yukio Yoshizawa, Masauji Hata, etc. and also police affairs chief of the Kuantung Army Mibu Saito as well as many captains of Kempeitai (military police) who were responsible for providing Unit 731 with victims for vivisection (their oral and written testimonies were reprinted in a book entitled Chemical and Biological Warfares published by Chunghua Book Company in 1989).

Both chemical and biological warfares were banned by the Geneva Convention of 1925. Totally disregarding international laws and human morality, Japan employed poison gas bombs in the Wusung-Shanghai campaign at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese war in August 1937. But not until Japan dropped bacterial bombs at Changte, did President Roosevelt issue a strong statement of protest on June 5, 1942, warning against Japan by saying that if Japan continued to use poison gases or other forms of inhuman warfare, it would invite U.S. retaliation in full measure. It was about this time, U.S. started its own biological warfare research with the approval of Roosevelt, but that ever since has been kept secret from the public. Also kept from the public is the U.S. role in suppressing all efforts to put Unit 731 on trial in the Tokyo Trial and its subsequent cover-up. As a result, unlike hundreds of Nazi doctors who were duly tried and sentenced in accordance with the "crime against humanity," Ishii and members of Unit 731 have not been brought to justice.

In the United States, the first person who uncovered serious atrocities committed by Unit 731 and raised the issue of possible U.S. cover-up was John W. Powell, Jr. (who took over his father's publication, The China Weekly, at Shanghai, which was suspended in June 1953, followed by his return to America. After his return, he had suffered from inexorable persecution). In the October 1981 issue of Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, jointly with Gomer and Rolling, he published "Japan's Biological Weapons, 1930-1945." However, a detailed, book-length account of the Japanese biological warfare Unit 731 and U.S. cover-up had not been available until Peter Williams and David Wallace, two British journalists, published their book, Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989; a translation was made by Tien-wei Wu and published by Academia Historica, Taipei, 1992).

On the foundation of the joint work of Williams and Wallace, Professor Sheldon Harris completed his monumental book, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and The American Cover-up (New York: Routledge, 1994). This article will try to compare Harris's work with that of Williams and Wallace and see whether Harris has succeeded in solving those questions first raised by Williams and Wallace and what remains for further academic inquiries. Before making the comparison between the two works, this writer will first report on what has been regarded as new or unheard-of in Kristofs article. So far as atrocities committed by Unit 731 are concerned, the most shocking revelation made by Kristof may be: (1) without giving anesthetic to the victim, vivisection was performed by Unit 731 doctors; (2) even three-day old baby was used for experimentation; and (3) Japan planned to use biological warfare against the United States.

In December 1944, Japan started a balloon assault on the U.S. by sending about 200 balloon bombs, but not germ bombs, to the west coast, each 30 feet in diameter and 91 feet round. They caused the deaths of 7 people. The person taking charge of the investigation of the balloons was none other than Murry Sanders, the man who was first sent to Japan to investigate Unit 731. Forty years later, Sanders recalled:

The only explanation I had, and still have, is that Ishii wasn't ready to deliver what he was making in Pingfang; that he hadn't worked out the technology. If they had been, we were at Ishii's mercy.

Moreover, Tojo had been the staunch supporter of Ishii and biological warfare. Dating back to his days as commander of Kempeitai of the Kuantung Army, Tojo was responsible for supplying Unit 731 with live experiment victims. Upon assumming premiereship in October 1941, Tojo personally presented an award to Ishii for his contribution to developing biological weapons and had a picture taken with him, which appeared in major newspapers. Unfortunately Tojo's responsibility for making biological weapons and using them was not charged at the Tokyo Trial. If Tojo indeed was opposed to using biological assault on the U.S. as Kristof believes, he did it probably not out of fear of U.S. retaliation rather than Japan's inability to deliver biological weapons.

Finally Kristof reports that one month before Japan surrendered, it still tried to send the "Kami kazi" suicide airplane with plague bombs carried by a submarine to attack San Diego on the west coast. Undoubtedly this is a piece of new information to fortify the belief that Japan on the eve of surrender still clung to a hope that the wheel of fortune might turn to its favor so as to escape the fate of unconditional surrender. The rest of Kristof s report was largely borrowed from the two books in question, which will be discussed in the ensuing pages.

I. The Origin of Unit 731

At the conclusion of World War I in 1918, the medical bureau of Japanese army set out to study biological warfare and assigned Major Terunobu Hasebe to head the research team, who was soon succeeded by Dr. Ito with a team of 40 scientists. This lasted a few years. However, the real beginning of Japan's biological warfare came only with the rise of Ishii Shiro. Ishii was graduated from the medical department of Kyoto University in 1920, and immediately joined the army. In 1924, he returned to Kyoto University for graduate studies, during which he married the daughter of President Torasaburo Akira of the University. He was awarded with Ph.D. in 1927. He rejoined the army and began to propagate biological warfare.

Harnessing the rising tide of Japanese militarism, Ishii rose to power which was redounded to three elements. First, in the name of a military attache, Ishii was sent to Europe in 1928. He pent the next two years in Europe and America to survey biological research in Western countries. After his return, he was promoted to major, and devoted himself to promoting research and manufacturing of biological weapons buttressed up by a theory that modem war could only be won by science and technology and that manufacturing biological weapons is most economical, particularly suitable for a country like Japan who is poor in natural resources. Second, Ishii found willing, powerful supporters in the army: Col. Tetsuzan Nagata, chief of military affairs; Col. Yoriniichi Suzuki, chief of lst tactical section of Army General Staff Headquarters; Col. Ryuiji Kajitsuka of medical bureau of the army; and Col. Chikahiko Koizumi, the Army's surgeon general (at the end of the war, he served as Minister of Public Health and comniitted suicide for fear of being prosecuted on war crimes), known as "father of Japanese chemical warfare; and the Minister of the Army and later as Education Minister Sadao Araki, leader of the "imperial way" faction in the Japanese army. Third, shortly after Ishii's return from Europe, a kind of meningitis erupted in Shikoku, for which Ishii designed his water filter which helped stop the spread of the disease, thereby making his name known, especially in the army where he became the most famous bacteriologist. In spite of all this, Ishii's greatest asset to his success probably lies in his lack of morality strongly required for a physician. He apparently excelled others in being sycophantic to his peers, while oppressive to his subordinates. Finally he was so lavish with money as he became a frequent, valuable customer of geisha houses.

Less than half a year after Japan launched the September 18 Mukden Incident in 1931, Japan occupied the whole of China's northeast or Manchuria. Ishii and Japanese military seized the opportunity to move the center for bacteriological research at the Army's Medical College established in 1930 to northern Manchuria for expansion with a view to making the Soviet Union the hypothetic enemy. A special advantage for this move was that the Kuantung Army could kill Chinese at will and provide for unlimited supply of human experiment materials. With Chinese lives at no cost, Japan could lead the world in biological warfare.

At the end of August, 1932, Ishii led a group of 10 scientists from the Army's Medical College to make a tour of Manchuria and came back with the decision to make Harbin the center biological research, while choosing a site at Peiyin River, 20 kilometers south of Harbin. to build a factory for human experiments. To confuse the public, Ishii's center inaugurated at the end of 1932 was sometimes called Kamo Unit and other times Togo Unit. Then Ishii was promoted to lieutenant colonel and the 1933 budget of Kamo Unit was a staggering some of 200,000 yen.

The year 1936 marked the establishment of two units by order of Emperor Hirohito: one was Ishii's unit (to the outside it was called "Epidemic Prevention and Water purification Department of the Kuantung Army," whose name was not changed to Unit 731 until 1941), which was to be relocated to a new base at Pingfan, 20 kilometers southwest of Harbin. The other was the Wakamatsu Unit (after the name of its commander Yujiro Wakamatsu, later changed to Unit 100) to be built at Mengchiatun, near Changchun; to the outside it was called Department of Veterinary Disease Prevention of the Kuantung Army. In June 1938, Unit 731 moved to its new location at Pingfang occupying an area of 32 sq. kilometers which was marked off as "no man's land." In the meantime, Ishii had a promotion to full colonel with 3,000 Japanese working under him.

Both the joint work of Williams and Wallace and Harris's new book based their accounts of the early history of Unit 731 upon the Fifty Year History of the Tokyo Amy Medical College (Tokyo, 1988); Seiichi Morimura, The Devil's Gluttony. 3 volumes (Tokyo, 1982-85); and Kei'ichi Tsuneishi's two books, The Germ Warfare Unit That Disappeared (Tokyo, 198 1) and with Tomizo Asano, The Bacteriological Warfare Unit and the Suicide of Two Physicians (Tokyo 1982). Both works made a thorough use of the Khabarovsk Trial, particularly the testimony give by Ryuiji Kajitsuka who himself was a physician and a bacteriologist. Also both were consulted with a posthumous work by Saburo Endo who was a colonel in the general staff of the Kuantung Army and made an inspection tour of Unit 731 in 1933. Harris's work had even consulted Endo's diary which was published in 1985. Both works confirm the amount of Unit 731's 1933 budget as 200,000 yen and that Emperor Hirohito decreed the establishment of the two biological warfare Units 731 and 100 in Manchuria.

II. U.S. Authorities Well Aware of Japan's Using Biological Warfare in China

As mentioned earlier, at the outbreak of the Wusung-shanghai campaign on August 13, 1937 and in front of the watching eyes of the American and British navies and many Europeans and Americans, the Japanese army used poison gas against Chinese troops. In the succeeding eight years of war, Japan in 14 Chinese provinces had used poison gases for 1, 131 times.

In the book by Williams and Wallace, there is a translation of Chinese accusation of Japan's dropping from airplane plague bacteria at Changte, Hunan, submitted by Chinese Ambassador to London Wellington Koo to the British government and the Conunittee for the Pacific War which reads:

On at least five occasions during the first two years the Japanese armed forces have tried to employ bacteriological warfare in China. They have tried to produce epidemics of plague in Free China by scattering plague-infected materials with airplanes.

These five times are: October 4, 1940, when Japanese airplane dropped plague bacteria at Chuhsien in Chechiang province which caused the deaths of 21 people. On the 29th of the same month, Japanese airplane spread plague bacteria at Ningpo, Chechiang which caused the deaths of 99 people. On November 28 of the same year, Japanese airplanes dropped a large quantity of germs at Chinhua but no death was reported. In January 1941 Japan spread plague germs in Suiyuan and Ninghsia provinces and again in Shansi that caused serious epidemic outbreaks of plague in these areas.

Not that the U.S. was not aware of the fruitful research on biological warfare the Japanese had accomplished. However, she did not take the Japanese biological program seriously, Harris believes, simply because Japan was far away from U.S. homeland and could not launch a massive attack on America and also because Japanese being Asian were incapable of developing sophisticated biological weapons without the help of white men. In the August 1942 Rocky Mountain Medical Journal , there appeared a lengthy article under the heading "Japanese Use the Chinese as 'Guinea Pigs' to Test Germ Warfare."

With increasing number of Japanese prisoners of war captured in the South Pacific, the U.S. found out that not only was Japan engaged in significant Biological research; its program was on a far larger scale than previously suspected. Americans then knew that Tokyo was the center for biological experimentation and that Ishii was the forerunner of Japanese biological warfare with his epidemic prevention and water purification headquarters at Harbin. Also known to the Americans, mainly from Japanese naval sources, were the size of Unit 731 and germ bombs being manufactured.

Not until September 1943, did the U.S. begin its own research on biological weapons with Lt. Col. Murry Sanders, a young bacteriologist, heading the program and with Camp Detrick in Maryland as its base. Although the United States was almost four years behind England in biological warfare research, its program grew rapidly and was capable of mass production. For instance, a spoonful botulinus toxin multiplied to fill the vat in 72 hours, to produce enough poison to destroy 50,000 or more men. The most successful experimentation achieved by Detrick was the virus being freeze-dried that could be delivered to the enemy's territory. It is natural that American scientists wished to acquire the fruits of Unit 731's research.

III. The Deal Between the United States and Former Members of Unit 731

Only one week after Japan surrendered, Col. Sanders was among the first group of Americans to land in Japan. His mission was to locate as soon as possible the Japanese biological warfare machine and Ishii himself. In the next three months, Sanders had interrogated many important military leaders and Scientists of Unit 731, notably Yoshijiro Umezu, Chief of the Army General Staff and erstwhile Kuantung Army Commander-in-Chief, Ishii's deputy Col. Tomosa Masuda, germ bomb expert Major Jun'ichi Kaneko, but not Ishii himself.

Upon his arrival in Japan, Sanders was immediately under the deception of his interprete Lt. Col. Ryoichi Naito. He was a student of Ishii at the Tokyo Army Medical College. When serving as assistant professor at the college in 1939, Naito was sent to America. His mission was to get yellow fever strain from the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, which was refused. Later at Pingfang, he became the right-hand man of Ishii. Eager to secure the experiment data of Unit 73 1, Sanders approached General Douglas MacArthur saying: "My recommendation is that we promise Naito that no one involved in BW will be prosecuted as war criminal." The recommendation was readily accepted by MacArthur. By September, Sanders discovered that Unit 731 was involved in human experiments and he took the issue to MacArthur whose response was, "We need more evidence. We can't simply act on that. Keep going. Ask more questions. And keep quiet about it."

Sanders spent only ten weeks in Japan and was ordered home. The second stage of investigation was taken over by his Detrick colleague Lt. Col. Arvo T. Thompson, a veterinarian. After his return, Sanders was protracted to tuberculosis and invalid for the next two years, having forever lost the chance to come back to Japan to renew the investigation of Unit 731. Forty year later, he told Williams and Wallace:

I talked to Arvo Thompson [who committed suicide in 1948] who was to carry of the next stage of the investigations. And I remember telling "Tommy" Thompson about the anthrax bomb and the experiments on the human beings. I told him specifically to look the anthrax experiments and the Uji bomb.

When Col. Thompson arrived in Japan, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East just began the trial of Japanese Class A war criminals. In the meantime, Maj. Gen. Kitano, Commander of Unit 731 from August 1942 to March 1944, was brought back to Japan from China to face interrogation. Though Ishii was declared dead in newspapers and a mock funeral was held in Ishii's home town, he was available for Thompson's interrogation which was to last from January 17 to February 25, 1946. Ishii's tactics of resistance was to speak as little as he could and minimize the magnitude of biological warfare research as much as possible. He admitted neither human experiments nor Emperor Hirohito's involvement and instead took the entire responsibility upon himself. Yet sometimes he boasted of his knowledge of biological warfare, for which he could have written many volumes. Like Sanders before him, Thompson was fooled. He finished his investigation report at the end of May 1946, augmenting knowledge on manufacturing germ bombs and technique of mass production of germs achieved by Unit 731.

Taking a hint from MacArthur, Chief Prosecutor of the Tokyo Trial Joseph B. Keenan (a Democrat politician from Ohio) suppressed the Soviet accusation against Japanese biological warfare criminals. Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence chief, was in charge of the whole affair of Unit 731, shielding its former members from any outside contact in order to avoid any research data on biological warfare fallen into the Soviet hands. Despite the fact that Lt. Col. Thomas H. Morrow (a lawyer from Ohio) of International Prosecution Section of the Tokyo Trial and David N. Sutton, head of its Document Division, made a trip to China to collect evidenc on Japanese waging biological warfare in China, during the afternoon of August 29, 1946 no sooner was the Unit 731 case raised than it was dropped. MacArthur was empowered "to approve, reduce or otherwise alter any sentence imposed by "the International Military 'Tribunal the Far East." Chief Prosecutor Keenan, though deriving his powers from the US government, handed control of the whole International Prosecution Section to MacArthur.

Williams and Wallace have ascribed the whole deal--that Ishii and members of Unit 731 were exonerated from being sued for war crimes in exchange for their human experiment data, a price paid by several thousand lives, most Chinese but some Soviets, Koreans, and Mongolians-largely to MacArthur. This is not quite true. Harris's new book has proved that U.S. scientists, mainly those from Detrick, were equally willing to make the deal, therefore bearing considerable responsibility.

In April 1947, General Allen Waitt, Commander of U.S. Chemical Corps, sent Camp Detrick bacteriologist Norbert Fell to Japan for investigation to assess the progress and level of achievement in biological warfare. To Fell, Ishii, Maj. Gen. Hitoshi Kikuchi, Col. Tomosada Masuda and Dr. Kan'ichiro Kamei, particularly the last mentioned, who earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University, had repeatedly expressed that more valuable data were forthcoming on condition of their immunity from war crimes. They insisted that verbal promise would not do. On May 5, 1947, MacArthur sent a radio message to Washington making the following recommendation:

Ishii states that if guaranteed inmmunity from "war crimes" in documentary form for himself, superiors and subordinates, he can describe program in detail ... Complete story, to include plans and theories of Ishii and superiors, probably can be obtained by document immunity to Ishii and associates.

The above message put the State-War-Navy Co-ordinating Conunittee at Washington into crucial dilemma. Its sub-committee for the Far East did not complete its report on MacArthur's May 6 recommendation until August 1, and in the report a comparison of Nazi scientists and doctors as war criminals was drawn:

Experiments on human beings similar to those conducted by the Ishii group have been condemned as war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the trial of major Nazi war criminals in its decision handed down at Nuremberg on September 30, 1946. This Government is at present prosecuting leading German Scientists and medical doctors at Nuremberg for offenses which included experiments on human beings which resulted in the suffering and death of most of those experimented on.

Ironically, the conclusion the Committee for the Far East reached was: "The value to the U.S. of Japanese BW data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from war crimes' prosecution." In spite of the State Department strongly dissenting as such a course would be a violation of international laws and detrimental to human morality and once revealed, it would be a source of serious embarrassment to the United States, the SWNCC accepted MacArthur's recommendation and decided that "the BW information obtained from Japanese sources should be retained in 'top secret' intelligence channels and not be employed as war crimes evidence" and not be fallen into the Soviet hands. However, the formal reply to MacArthur's recommendation had dragged on until March 13, 1948, when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent his cable of approval to Tokyo.

From Sanders's first investigation in the autumn of 1945, MacArthur acceded to granting immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for data of research on biological warfare. He also inculcated on Sanders to keep silence on "human experiments." And the belated reply from the Joint Chiefs to MacArthur's May 6, 1947 recommendation can only be construed on broad background. First, the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union began with Winston Churchill's March 1946 speech that the "iron curtain" was lowered in Eastern Europe, followed by Marshall's commencement speech at Harvard University next June which promised U.S. aids for rehabilitation of Western Europe. Then there was the Berlin blockade by the Soviet Union in June 1948, thus having constituted nearly 40 years of Cold War. Only viewed against this background, an we understand why the United States tried its utmost to get ahead in the biological warfare.

The second element which is also related to the first is that the granting of immunity from war crimes of Unit 731 fell in the province of MacArthur's authority. Then he was virtually a "super emperor of Japan." For the expediency of his rule in Japan or for his love for the Japanese that had been generated, by 1947 MacArthur had lost his interest in pursuing the issue of war criminals and in making Japan to pay war reparations to the victimized nations, particularly China. Just as Fell once said in connection with MacArthur Headquarter's secret funding for Unit 731: "The feeling of several staff groups in Washington, including G-2, is that this problem is more or less a 'family' affair in FEC [Far East Command]." Hence that Washington respected MacArthur's opinion was rather natural.

IV. U.S. Prisoners of War Used for Experiment by Unit 731 and the Issue of American Use of Biological Warfare in Korean War

As early as January 6, 1946, the Pacific Stars and Stripes, an official organ of the U.S. Army, reported that Americans were among the victims of Ishii's human experiments. A week later, similar reports was ensued in New York Times, hence news about Allied prisoners of war to have been used as human guinea pigs were sporadically divulged. An U.S. government document dated August 1947 has this to say:

It should be kept in mind that there is a remote-possibility that independent investigation conducted by the Soviets in the Mukden area may have disclosed evidence that American prisoners of war were used for experimental purposes of a BW nature and that they lost their lives as a result of these experiments.

Until 1956, the Federal Bureau of Investigation continued to accept as fact that U.S. prisoners of war were used in human experiments. In the 1960s, the issue no longer riveted the public interest. In 1976, Japanese television broadcast a documentary entitled "A Bruise-Terrors of the 731 corps," which rekindled the public interest which grew apace in America in the 1980s. Out of 1,485 Allied white prisoners of war taken to Mukden, 1, 174 were Americans. In their first winter (1942-43) at Mukden, 430 perished, most Americans. No matter how desperate American survivors from Mukden, like Gregory Rodriquez of Oklahoma, tried to tell how they were used by Unit 731 for human experiments, an accusation verified by Naoji Uezono, former member of Unit 731, U.S. Congress turned a deaf ear , thereby being irresponsible for paying their medical benefits and compensations. A British Major Robert Peaty kept a diary while detained in Mukden that gives sufficient evidence of Unit 731's using Allied prisoners of war as guinea pigs. Another Australian doctor R. J. Brennan also kept a diary, indicating that how the prisoners of war underwent experimentation. What bothered him most was one day 150 American prisoners were forced to march out of the camp, from which they never returned.

For over ten years, Rodriquez's son has persistently lobbied in Washington on behalf of his father and other survivors from Mukden. Not only does he ask for compensations to the victims; moreover he wants that the crimes of Japan using the prisoners of war for human experiments be known to the world. He told this writer that there is a former Mukden prisoner now living in Oklahoma who was taken to Pingfang, Harbin. The chapter "BW Experiments on Prisoners of War?" of Harris's new book has given great details, but had some discrepancies in figures. Also it is hard to accept his conclusion. He says that death rate at Mukden Camp was about 12 percent, almost all being Americans. Both Jack-Roberts of the royal Army Medical Corps and Frank James, a sergeant in the U.S. signal Company, confirmed that in that first winter, 430 men died. In the August 6, 1943 entry of Major Peaty's diary, "there are now 208 dead"; in the November 21, 1943 entry, "there are now over 230 dead." 430 plus 230 have made 44 percent of the Mukden POW population. Further, how many more deaths would have been in the next two years!

According to Harris's tally, there were only 238 POW dead at Mukden Camp and 1,617 survivors, figures which are far apart from those given by former British and American POWs at Mukden. His conclusion is that "American POWs may have been victims of BW tests, but there is no substantive evidence to prove that the experiments took place at Camp Mukden."

It is unthinkable that Harris wrote only two pages on the issue of U.S. using biological warfare in the Korean War, which he apparently did not want to talk about; in contrast, Williams and Wallace used 51 pages, one-sixth of the whole book dealing with the subject. China and North Korean began to accuse the United States of using CW and BW on March 5, 1951, a campaign which was stopped only with the conclusion of the war in 1953. Most importantly, International Science Committee composed of renown "Leftist" scientists sent a delegation to China and North Korea, whose investigation lent support to the accusation. This writer would take issue with Professor Harris for his using the term "Leftist." Could we ask: Is J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of atomic bomb" also labeled Leftist scientist? Does being Leftist make one non-scientific? And then how about "Rightist" scientist? The six that came to China and North Korea included Dr. Joseph Needham who just died last March. Needham's studies of Chinese culture (he had studied the history of Chinese science and technology for over fifty years) and his concern for China had won esteem of Chinese intellectuals both in Taiwan and the Mainland, who would not question the results of his investigation and regard them as propaganda. Harris believes that the issue of American use of biological warfare cannot be clarified until archives of all countries concerned are open. Surely we hope this can be realized soon, but at the same time should point out that the release of more archival materials cannot overthrow a scientific investigation already made.

Also, Harris tried to water down the issue of confession given by U.S. airmen under captivity. Col. Frank H. Schwable was the chief of the First Marine Air Wing. After having been captured, Schwable and Major Roy Bley made "confessions" stating that "the joint Chiefs of Staff had directed U.S. forces to carry out planned germ warfare and that the order was part of a directive given to General Ridgway in October 1951" (New York Times, February 23, 1953).

At least as important as Schwable were Col. Walker F. Mahurin, World War II fighter ace and an assistant executive to US Secretary for Air Finletter, and Col. Andrew J. Evans, a former secretary to Air Chief of Staff Vandenberg. Before coming to Korea, Mahurin was commander of the First Fighter Interceptor Group in California which supplied men and equipment to the 51st and 4th fighter wings near Seoul. After being released, Mahurin was elected as spokesman for all POW fliers. All the 25 airmen who made confession under captivity had repudiated their confessions and denied BW charges. But Mahurin wrote his memoirs (Honest John published by Putnam of New York without date) which reveals and contradicts some of his sworn repudiation to his confession.

Any fair-minded person would not believe that the United States had tried to unleash a large-scale biological warfare in the Korean war. Needham said in reminiscence:

I felt then, and still feel, that attacks using toxic aerosols would have been far more dangerous, but I think the Americans just wanted to see what degree of success could be obtained with the essentially Japanese methods. My judgment was never based on anything which the downed airmen had said, but rather entirely on the circumstantial evidence.

As a matter of fact, over the issue of whether or not the United States was engaged in biological warfare, irrefutable evidence is still lacking; hopefully it could be resolved in the near future. Should it then prove that the U.S. indeed used biological warfare, one would not be surprised. Let us bear in mind that at his November 30, 1950 news conference, when asked "Does mean that there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?" President Truman said: "There has always been active consideration of its use. I don't want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon."

V. Conclusion

The new work on Unit 731 by Harris as the joint work by Williams and Wallace certainly reflects years of studies, traveling for collecting archival materials which had long been closed and conducting interviews with former members of Unit 731 and others involved who otherwise would have kept silence on the sensitive issues of Japanese biological warfare and American cover-up. Despite the fact that the two works have not solved all the questions such as Japan's plan for using biological weapons to stop the invading Soviet army north of the Yalu River and to repel the landing of U.S. forces in Kyushu in the south, they together have given us a thorough understanding of the developments of Japanese and American biological warfare and how the immunity from war criminal charges granted to Ishii and members of Unit 731 had been done. Undoubtedly the two books combined represent a breakthrough in scholarship and have made a great contribution to the general public.

As in any excellent work, it is easy to carp some criticism, both works have made insufficient references to Chinese sources. Since Unit 731 caused a terrible havoc to the Chinese people, information about which has largely been found in Chinese materials. For instance, in the collection entitled Selected Archival Meterials of Japanese Imperialist Aggression against China: Biological Warfare and Poison Gas Warfare (Beijing: Chunghua Book Company, 1989), there are testimonies given by scores of members of Unit 731 and people aasociated with it are invaluable source materials. For the celebration of the 50th anniversary of China's victory in the War of Resistance against Japan, a comprehensive work treating the subject of Japanese biological warfare against China will make its appearance. Still, crucial to our knowledge of Unit 731 are Japanese sources. Recently a few former members of Unit 731, regardless of the pressure from the Japanese government, resolutely came out and gave their witnesses to truth and history and for their posterity. It is anticipated that what remain to be riddles of Unit 731 will soon be revealed to the world.

Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Coverup By Sheldon H. Harris Routledge

Decades before the Aum Shinri Kyo religious sect began gassing subways, the Japanese government funded another horror: the world's most brutal biological warfare (BW) experiments on human subjects. According to writer Sheldon Harris, all of this was delicately covered up for years by the United States in return for the valuable test data.

From the time Japan occupied all of Manchuria in 1931-1932 until the 1945 surrender to Allied forces, the Manchurian countryside became pockmarked with ugly scientific buildings known to locals only as "lumber mills," surrounded by moats and patrolled by aircraft. In these macabre fortresses, deadly microbes - such as anthrax, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery - were tested on live human subjects, who were either kidnapped from neighboring villages or shipped in via POW boats. Once the subjects - or "material" - had exhausted their usefulness and died, the corpses were cremated on-site or dumped in mass graves. Occasionally a nearby town was surreptitiously infected with plague germs. After inhabitants showed terminal symptoms, the test was deemed successful, and the community burned to destroy all evidence.

Sheldon Harris has spent the past 10 years compiling the definitive tome on the subject. One chilling account describes an outdoor test performed on Chinese prisoners:

"The subjects were bound to stakes some 10 to 20 meters away from a shrapnel bomb that was loaded with gas gangrene. The object was not to kill the men by exploding the bomb, but to test the effectiveness of gas gangrene as a BW weapon in below zero temperatures. Consequently, 'their heads and backs were protected with special metal shields and thick quilted blankets, but their legs and buttocks were left unprotected.' Using a remote-control device, the researchers exploded the bomb, and 'the shrapnel, bearing gas gangrene germs, scattered all over the spot where the experimentees were bound. All the experimentees were wounded in the legs or buttocks, and seven days later they died in great torment.'"

According to Harris's exhaustive research, three principal leaders of the BW program - Ishii Shiro, Kitano Masaji, and Wakamatsu Yujiro - were responsible for camps with ominously nondescript names like Unit 731 or Unit Ei1644. Once the war ended, all three men escaped prosecution. United States investigators reportedly cut a deal with them, promising complete immunity in exchange for their data, which was hidden from the War Crimes Tribunal and confined solely to the intelligence community. Thus, when the trials ended in 1948, Soviet and United States intelligence agents swarmed over Japan in a Cold War panic, hurriedly interviewing all known participants. The same questions were on all of their minds:

How did the Japanese do it? What were the results?

The American coverup was kept secret until a 1981 article in the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists" by John W. Powell Jr., which eventually led to investigative segments on 60 Minutes and 20/20. Even today, 50 years after the Japanese death factories, United States intelligence still refuses to make public certain related information.

Harris's conclusion is open-ended. The reader is invited to ponder: What does the government have to hide? If the United States claims its own BW experiments ended in 1945, why were Persian Gulf soldiers inoculated with unproven vaccines, including anthrax, and why are 67 percent of their children born with severe illnesses or birth defects? When Factories of Death starts raising questions, they reach uncomfortably close to home.

A Preliminary Review of Studies of Japanese Biological Warfare Unit 731 in the United States

Angry at the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing during WWII, German diplomat John Rosen sent Magee's film to Nazi government and requested film be shown to Hilter and claimed Japanese army was a "Violent Killing Machine".

At a time when Japan is seeking permanent status in the United Nations Security Council, Mr. Chan's death serves as warning that a nation with a history of aggression, crimes against humanity, and with no signs of remorse, is not worthy of occupying a seat in the UN Security Council.

"The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle." recalled the old former medical assistant of a Japanese Army unit in China in World War II, "But when I picked up the scalpel that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped." The former medical assistant who insisted on anonymity, explained the reason for the vivisection. The Chinese prisoner had been deliberately infected with the plague as part of a research project - the full horror of which is only now emerging - Japanese Army set up Headquarters of Unit 731 near Harbin, China to develope plague bombs for use in World War II. After infecting him, the researchers decided to cut him open to see what the disease does to a man's inside. NO anesthetic was used, he said, out of concern that it might have an effect on the results.

The research program was one of the great secrets of Japan during and after World War II : a vast project to develope weapons of biological warfare, including plague, anthrax, cholera and a dozen other pathogens. Unit 731 was comprised of over three thousand researchers and technicains. It was a gigantic research center focused on biological weapons. The vivisection was also routinely used for practicing various kinds of surgery says Dr. Ken Yuasa, a former Japanese doctor working in China during the War. First an appendectomy, then an amputation of an arm and finally a tracheotomy. When they finished practcing, they killed the patient with an injection.

Medical researchers also locked up diseased prisoners with healthy ones, to see how readily various ailments would spread. The doctors put others inside a pressure chamber to see how much the body can withstand before the eyes pop from their sockets. To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water, until the frozen arm emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck.

The doctors even experimented on a three-day-old baby, measuring the temperature with a needle stuck inside the infant's middle finger to keep it straight to prevent the baby's hand clenching into a fist. Victims were often taken to a proving ground called Anda, where they were tied to stakes and bombarded with test weapons to see how effective the new technologies were. Planes sprayed the zone with a plague culture or dropped bombs with plague-infected fleas to see how many people would die.

The Japanese Army regularly conducted "Field Tests". Planes dropped plague-infected fleas over Ningbo in eastern China and over Changde in north-central China, Japanese troops also dropped cholera and typhnid cultures in wells and ponds.

Sheldon H. Harris, a historian at California State University in Northridge and author of a book on Unit 731, "Factories of Death" estimates that more than 200,000 Chinese were killed in germ warfare field experiments. Professor Harris also says plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused outbreaks of the plague that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area form 1946 through 1948.

In what Harris describes as a "Faustian bargain", the research was kept secret after the war in part because the U.S. granted immunity from war crimes prosecution to the Japanese doctors in EXCHANGE for their data. Japanese and American documents show that the United States helped cover up the human experimentation. Instead of putting the ringleaders on trial, U.S. gave them stipends.

When Japan launched its full scale invasion into China, Japan claimed that it would take only three months for them to conquer the whole China. Yet they had to spent three months just to capture Shanghai with great casualties to Japanese army. In December 13th 1937, Nanjing, the capital of China during the war, finally fell to the Japanese. Japanese military force immediately systematically start murdering Chinese civilian under the 'Take all, Kill all, Burn all' military policy. It was a well planned, full scale revenge designed to intimidate and crush the spirit of China. In the next six weeks, the Japanese committed the infamous Nanjing Massacre, or the Rape of Nanjing. The brutalities included shooting, stabbing, cutting open the abdomen, excavating the heart, decapitation, drowning, punching the body and eye with an awl. Thousands of civilians were buried or burn alive, or used as targets for bayonet practice, shot in large groups and thrown into Yangtze River. Soldiers competed in all kinds of "KILLING CONTEST" and sent the number of murders back to newspaper in Japan to publish.

"I have never been to hell, but there is a hell, it was in this city," reporter for the Tokyo Times told the killing in Nanjing. "At one time, after Nanking was captured, more than 30,000 Chinese were driven to the foot of the city wall. Machine guns then swept the crowd and grenades were thrown from atop the wall. The 30,000 people were all killed, most of them were women, children, and elderly." reported Toyoko Asahi Shimbun correspondent Yoshio Moriyama on December 14, 1937. A Dec. 15, 1937 entry to the diary of a Japanese soldier in the 23rd Regiment of the 18th Division, published in Tokyo Asahi Shimbun on August 4, 1984: "When we were bored, we had some fun killing Chinese. Buried them alive, or push them into a fire, or beat them to death with clubs, or kill them by other cruel means."

Witnessed the atrocities, Reverend John Magee used his camera and recorded the Massacre in a 16mm film. It is believed to be the only documentary about this infamous incident. He was an Episcopal pastor in charge of the so-called Nanjing Inernational Safety Zone created when Japanese army captured Nanjing in 1937.

Angry at the Japanese atrocities, German diplomat Mr. John Rosen sent a copy of Magee's film to the Nazi government. He also included a long report which claimed that the whole Japanese army was a "Violent Killing Machine". In it, he requested that the film be shown to Hitler.

Chinese and Japanese scholars were aware of the film but were unable to locate it. Japanese then said that since there was no proof, the Nanjing Massacre never occurred.

When the German Archive at Botsdam was opened in 1990 after collapsing of the Berlin Wall, the Rosen report surfaced, but the film's whereabouts were still unknown. After a long search, the four rolls of the film and the diaries were finally found in Yale University Library and in the house of Mr. David Magee, Reverend Magee's son. According to Magee's dairy, he could only record a very small part of what he witnessed since he was too busy to save lives.

Brackman, a reporter at the Tokyo Trial and author of the book "The Other Nuremberg" commented "The Nanjing Massacre was not the kind of isolated incident common to wars. It was deliberate. It was policy. It was known in Tokyo." Yet it was allowed to continue for over six weeks.

"In terms of measures and cruelty of the genocide, its duration and large numbers of people killed," says professor of history of Southern Illinois University "Neither Hiroshima nor Jewish Holocaust can rival the Nanjing Massacre." The international community estimated that more than 300,000 Chinese were killed, and 20,000 women were raped within six weeks of continuous Massacre.

Yet Japan often said that Japan's aim in World War II was simply to liberate Asia from Western colonialism and project themselves as the victims instead of perpetrators of World War II because atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ignoring all the facts that Nanjing Masscare and infamous Unit 731 were one of the Ugliest chapters against Humanity in the 20th century. Japan is responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million Chinese during the 14 years of invason, not to mention large numbers of Koreans, Indonesia (4 million), Vietnam (2 million), India (1.5 million), Filipions (1 million) and other Asian countries. It was a Holocaust committed by Japan in World War II and not yet confessed.

The debate has been smouldering in Japan for the past 40 years. History professor Saburo Lenaga, who has now become for many the living *conscience of Japan, has launched no less than three highly publicized lawsuits against the Department of Education. Based on his own research, he wrote a high school textbook which included Japan's terrible War crimes : Nanjing Massacre and infamous Unit 731. Time after time again, his manuscripts were sent back from the Education Department. He was asked to delete a reference to the Japanese "aggression" in China and told to use the words "military advance" instead. Regarding the Nanjing massacre, he had to haggle with education officials over the number of Chinese civilians killed. As for the infamous Unit 731, it was made clear that any mention of its existence would quite simply bar the book from publication. Finally Mr. Lenaga got angry and sued the Education Department.

The Lenaga's cases have encouraged testimonies and historical research. In view of the evidence being unveiled everywhere, the Education Department examiners have had no choice but to relax their criteria even before the final decision of the Supreme Court is handed down. It has now been 12 years since he launched his third lawsuit against the Education Department and there is no telling when the Supreme Court will deliver its final decision. He has lost all his cases before.

"Japan is a very strange country, truth cannot prevail," Nagase Takashi another former imperial solder, says in a mock incredulous voice. "So I am a citizen of the world and NOT a Japanese." Mr. Nagase is also a devoted crusader for a just cause. He dares to do the unthinkable in Japan. He calls the Japanese royal family the war criminal family, saying the Emperor should either commit harikiri or become a Shinto priest. Herohito could have stopped the war at any time. And he never took any responsibility.

Japan has successfully brainwashed its own people by glorifying Convicted CLASS A War Criminals As National Heroes and publicly denied the atrocities - Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731. In August this year, the Japanese Prime Minister and many officials even paid their respect at the shrine honouring their War Criminals. 80 % of the Japanese now do not know that Japan had ever invaded another country, he says. "They only know the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima and we lost the war." Mr. Nagase believes Japan DESERVED the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the atomic bombs immediately stopped the war, saving numerous lives of Japanese, PoWs, and civilians in Asian countries.

Japan, driven by the frenzy of militarism, committed unspeakable war crimes and atrocities of such great magnitude unmatched even by the Fascism and Nazism that most people have termed it "The Forgotten Holocaust in Asia". Following table is a comparison of the war atrocities :

-----

By Nazis

By Japan

US POWs captured & interned in WWII

96,614

33,021

US POWs died while interned

1,121 (1.1 %)

12,526 (37%)

US civilians captured & interned in WWII

4,749

13,996

US civilians died while interned

168 (3.5 %)

1,536 (11%)

(source: The Center for Civilian Internee Right, Inc.)

Germany has now regained the trust of her neighbours while Japan continues to invite suspicion from Asia.

In 1987, Japan shamelessly moved their war criminals' momorials into Yasukuni Shinto shrine to be worshipped as national heros. In July 1996, the Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto broke a decade long taboo by visiting shrine honoring these war criminals. The Japanese ruling Liberal Democratic party and right wingers even incorporated the worship as the national policy that the cabinet ministers should officially pay tribute to the shrine.

The Japanese constitution bans "land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential." Yet, because of the wonders of constitutional interpretation and encouraged by United State, Japan has now built its self-defense forces into one of the most powerful armies in Asia, supported by the equivalent of US $50 billion military budget, second or third largest in the world only after that of the United States, and probably Russia. From 1985 to 1994 Japan's military spending increased 58 % as Europe and US decreased theirs. For example, Germany decreased their military spending by 24.7 %. In contrast, Japanese military spending in 1994 was 44.6 billions in exceess of 61.1 % compared to China's spending of only 27.68 billions. Japan was the number 1 in the world spent $76,500 per military personnel which was 4.4% more than U.S.

German leaders consistantly apologize for their past aggression in the clearest possible terms. Former Chancellor Willy Brandt once even fell to his knees at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in the tribute with the utmost sincerity to those who died there at the Nazi hands.

In Germany, it is a Crime to utter what is called "the Auschwitz lie" - denial of the death camps. For more than five decades, the Japanese have danced and dodged around the edges of their war Crimes and atrocities.

Germany has made generous acts of atonement and has paid 88 billions Mark in compensation and reparations to Jewish Holocaust victums and will spend another 20 billions Mark by 2005. Yet, Japan has virtually paid nothing and continues to maintain an innocence that contracts vividly with Germany's profound self-examination.

Also in contrast, the United States has compensated Japanese held in WWII internment camps with $20,000 each. Similar compensation was also given to the Candian Japanese by the Canadian government few years ago.

The constant reminders of the atrocities of Germany's Nazi regime is now recognized as a major preventive measure against the revival of Nazism in Germany. The annual commemoration of the victims of Hiroshima provides a strong basis for the resistance to the dangerous of nuclear wars. To bring attention to the Ugliest War Crimes against Humanity in 20th century committed by Japan can prevent the current resurgence of Militarism in Japan and anywhere in the world as well.

If Japan wants to play a larger political role in the World or to secure a permanent seat on the UN Security Concil, Japan MUST settle its past. Simply adopting a "No War Resolution" after half century denial without a formal sincere apology to the victims during the War, Japan missed again a golden opportunity to reconcil with its neighbours. Denial will not make the past go away. Only by facing the truth of history with courage as Germany, can Japan bring the wounds of war to a final closure. Until this is done, Japan remains as a country without SOUL.

1932 -- Japanese troops invade Manchuria. Shiro Ishii, a physician and army officer who was intrigued by germ warfare, begins preliminary experiments.

1936 -- Unit 731, a biological-warfare unit disguised as a water-purification unit, is formed. Ishii builds huge compound -- more than 150 buildings over six square kilometers -- outside the city of Harbin. Some 9,000 test subjects, which Ishii and his peers called "logs," eventually die at the compound.

1942 -- Ishii begins field tests of germ warfare on Chinese soldiers and civilians. Tens of thousands die of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases. U.S. soldiers captured in Philippines are sent to Manchuria.

1945 -- Japanese troops blow up the headquarters of Unit 731 in final days of Pacific war. Ishii orders 150 remaining ''logs'' killed to cover up their experimentation. Gen. Douglas MacArthur is named commander of the Allied powers in Japan.

1946 -- U.S. coverup of secret deal with Ishii and Unit 731 leaders -- germ warfare data based on human experimentation in exchange for immunity from war-crimes prosecution -- begins in earnest. Deal is concluded two years later.

1981 -- John Powell, a former publisher of a Shanghai magazine who was unsuccessfully tried for sedition in the early 1950s after accusing the United States of using germ warfare in Korea, exposes immunity deal in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

1985 -- Dr. Murray Sanders, a former lieutenant colonel who was a U.S. adviser on biological warfare, claims that he persuaded MacArthur to approve the immunity deal in the fall of 1945.

1986 -- Congressional subcommittee holds one-day hearing in Washington, called by Rep. Pat Williams of Montana, aimed at determining whether U.S. prisoners of war in Manchuria were victims of germ-warfare experimentation. Hearing is inconclusive.

He was imprisoned in China for crimes to which he confessed after the war, and returned to Japan after his release in 1956.

He now works in a clinic and lives near Ogikubo in Tokyo.

My father had his own practice in Shitamachi, the old district of Tokyo. I became a doctor myself in March 1941. I took the exam to become a short-term army doctor in the fall. Everyone passed. You can't fight a war without doctors. In December 1941, I entered the Twenty-Sixth Regiment in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, and within two months was promoted to first lieutenant. We were a privileged elite, treated as if we were different from the rest of the people.

I was soon dispatched to a city hospital in the southern part of Shansi province in China. I arrived there January 1, 1942. It was still bitterly cold that day in the middle of March when, just after lunch, the director of the hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Nishimura, summoned everyone together. Seven or eight MDs, an accounting officer, a pharmacist, and a dentist. All officers. He excused the housekeeper and other women. After they'd left, he said, "We'll be carrying out an operation exercise. Assemble again at one o'clock." I was chilled to the bone, but it wasn't the weather. I'd heard in before I went that they did vivisections there.

The hospital building adjoined a courtyard and a requisitioned middle-school building. Our patients were in there. There were nearly a hundred employees. Ten nurses, fifty to sixty technicians, some noncoms, too. I'm the kind of man who usually agrees to whatever I'm told to do. A "yes man," you could say. I remember that first time clearly. I arrived a little late; my excuse was that I had some other duties. ...

A solitary sentry stood guard. He saluted me the moment I opened the door. I then saw Medical Service Colonel Kotake and Hospital Director Nishimura, so I snapped to attention and saluted. They returned my salute calmly. I approached Hirano, my direct superior. That's when I noticed two Chinese close to the director. One was a sturdy, broadchecked man, about thirty, calm and apparently fearless, standing immobile. I thought immediately, that man's a Communist. Next to him was a farmer about forty years old. He was dressed as if he had just been dragged in from his field. His eyes raced desperately about the room. Three medics were there, holding rifles. Nurses were adjusting the surgical instruments by the autopsy tables. There were some fifteen or sixteen doctors present.

You might imagine this as a ghastly or gruesome scene, but that's not how it was. It was just the same as any other routine operation. I was still new to it. I thought there must be a reason for killing those people. I asked Hirano, but he just answered, "We're going to kill the whole Eighth Route Army."' I pretended to know what he meant. The nurses were all smiling. They were from the Japanese Red Cross.

The director said, "Let's begin." A medic pushed the steadfast man forward. He lay down calmly. I thoulyht he'd resigned himself to it. That was completely wrong. As a rule, Chinese don't glare at you. He had come prepared to die, confident in China's ultimate victory and revenge over a cruel, unjust Japan. He didn't say that aloud, but going to his death as he did spoke for itself. I didn't see that back then.

I was in the group assigned to the other fellow. A medic ordered him forward. He shouted, "No! No!" and tried to flee. The medic, who was holding a rifle, couldn't move as fast as the farmer, and I was a new officer, just arrived in the command. I was very conscious of my dignity as a military man. The hospital director was watching. I never really thought, if this man dies, what will happen to his family? All I thought was, it will be terribly embarrassing if I end up in a brawl, this man in farmer's rags and me dressed so correctly. I wanted to show off. I pushed that farmer and said, "Go fonvard!" He seemed to lose heart, maybe because I'd spoken up. I was very proud of myself. Yet when he sat on the table, he refused to lie down. He shouted "Ai-ya-a! Ai-ya-a!" as if he knew that if he lay down he was going to be murdered. But a nurse then said, in Chinese, "Sleep, sleep." She went on, "Sleep, sleep. Drug give" -Japanese-style Chinese. The Chinese of the oppressor always bears that tone, as if to say, "There's no possibility you will fail to understand what I'm saying." He lay down. She was even prouder than me. She giggled. The demon's face is not a fearful face. It's a face wreathed in smiles.

I asked the doctor who was about to administer lumbar anesthesia if he wasn't going to disinfect the point of injection. "What are you talking about? We're going to kill him," he replied. After a while, a nurse struck the man's legs and asked him if it hurt. He said it didn't, but when they tried to get him to inhale chloroform, he began to struggle. We all had to hold him down.

First, was practice in removing an appendix. That was carried out by two doctors. When a man has appendicitis, his appendix swells and grows very hard. But there was nothing wrong with this man, so it was hard to locate. They made an incision, but had to cut in another place and search until they finally found it. I remember that.

Next a doctor removed one of his arms. You must know how to do this when a man has shrapnel imbedded in his arm. You have to apply a tourniquet, to stanch the flow of blood. Then two doctors practiced sewing the intestines. If the intestine or stomach is pierced by bullets, that kind of surgery is a necessity. Next was the opening of the pharynx. When soldiers are wounded in the throat, blood gathers there and blocks the trachea, so you need to open it up. There is a special hook-shaped instrument for field use for cutting into the trachea. You drive it in, hook it open, then remove it, leaving only a tube behind. The blood drains out. It all took almost two hours. You remember the first time.

Eventually, all the doctors from the divisions left. Then the nurses departed. Only the director, the medics, and those of us from the hospital remained. The one I did, small-framed and old, was already dead. But from the sturdy man's mouth came, "Heh. Heh. Heh." One's last gasps are still strong. It gave us pause to think of throwing him, still breathing, into the hole out back, so the director injected air into his heart with a syringe. Another doctor-he's alive today-and I then had to try to strangle him with string. Still he wouldn't die. Finally, an old noncom said, "Honorable Doctor, he'll die if you give him a shot of anesthesia." Afterwards we threw him into the hole. This was the first time.

Japan's occupation of China was no more than a collection of dots and lines in a vast theater of operations. When a man suffered from appendicitis, you couldn't bring him to a hospital. His appendix had to be removed right there at the front line. But there weren't enough surgeons available. Even ophthalmologists or pediatricians had to be able to do it, and they didn't know how, so they practiced. Doctors weren't in China piimarily to cure illness. No, we were there so that when units clashed, the leaders could give orders to the soldiers and say, "We have doctors to take care of you. Charge on!" We were part of the military's fighting capability. It was easier to get men to fight if they thought there was a doctor to treat them when they were hit.

The next time we did it, we were practicing sewing up intestines for bullet wounds that had passed through the stomach. I remember the dentist was there, too, saying, "Oh, I've got his teeth!" The urologist removed the testicles. The hospital director said, "I will instruct you myself in this technique." He cut into the intestine and then sewed it back up. At that moment a phone call came for him, and he left the room to take it. One doctor observed the director's work and noticed something wrong: "It's sewed up backwards!" We all laughed. When the director returned, we were still snickering, but when he asked "What is it? What's the matter?" we just couldn't tell him. I remember fragments like this.

Orders for such exercises went from First Army headquarters, through the army hospital, and out to the divisions and brigades. in the beginning, exercises were conducted only twice, in the spying and the autumn. But by the end, we were getting doctors who couldn't do a thing, couldn't even handle instruments. Old men. I felt, we have to do this much more often. We should do it six times a year. I took the initiative and sought permission from the hospital. It was necessary to improve the technique of the army doctors. I did that as a loyal servant of the Japanese military. I felt I was willing to do anything to win. Doctor Ishii Shiro, the director of Unit 731, came to our hospital many times for education. "If the only way to win a war against America is bacterial warfare, I am ready. I will do anything," I thought. "This is war."

Besides training, I also treated patients. Sometimes they were wounded soldiers, but half suffered from tuberculosis. Infectious diseases, malaria, typhoid, dysentery, and liver diseases were common. I really enjoyed my work. When I went out to town, I could swagger, you know, swing my shoulders as a Japanese officer, feeling I was serving the nation, and watch people treat me well because they were afraid of me. Everybody saluted an officer. All the girls addressed me as "Honorable Military Doctor." If anybody showed even a trace of resistance, we could send him directly to the front. It was easy at the hospital. We had no worries about being killed. We had plenty of sakee. Anything we wanted. I felt I ruled the whole country. At morning roll call, they saluted me. I had only to say, straighten up that line, and they'd do it. They'd move back and forth until I told them to stop. I did it only for the sake of my own ego.

In late 1942, at the time of the battle for Guadalcanal, we realized things weren't going to be too easy. About forty doctors were gathered in the city of Taiyuan for a meeting. We were told to assemble at Taiyuan Prison, where I ended up myself a few years later. There, two men from the judicial corps brought out a couple of blindfolded Chinese. They then asked the doctor in charge of the meeting if everything was set. At his nod, they suddenly shot the Chinese, right in their stomachs, four or five times each. We then had to remove the bullets. That was our challenge. Could we remove them while they were still alive? That was how they measured the success or failure of the operation. When asked, "Want to do it?" I said, "No. I do this all the time." But eventually everyone got in on it, helping to control the bleeding or whatever. They both died.

We also carried out medic training. It was in 1944, at a time when we already knew we were going to lose. Those soldiers! Skinny and hardly able to write at all. I was in charge of education by then. I decided there was no way to teach them except by practical experience. I went to the Kempeitai and asked them to give us one of their prisoners. We practiced leg amputation. The one I got bore no traces of torture. I remember how surprised I was. "This one's real clean," I thought. I remember one soldier fainted.

Another time they sent us two for educational purposes. We didn't have many doctors at the time, so we were able to do all we had to do on just one of them. But we really couldn't send the other one back. So the director chopped his head off. He wanted to test the strength of his sword.

We received requests from a Japanese pharmaceutical company for brain-cortex tissue. They were making adrenocortical hormones. We cut tissue from the brains and sent it along. We sent one bottle. Then a second request came from the company for ten bottles, which we filled. This was a "private route." Everybody was involved.

....

I was imprisoned until 1956. That's when I returned to Japan.

All the doctors and the nurses who had been with me at that hospital in Shansi came to Shinagawa station to welcome me when I returned to Tokyo. The nurses said to me, "Doctor, you had such a hard time. We're so sorry for you." One man said, "Doctor Yuasa, I hope you did your best to assert your Emperor's policy was just and Communism was wrong." That's what they said! I told them, "Don't you remember? I did those things with you. You did them, too." The man I said that to seemed to shudder. Suddenly, for the first time, he recalled that he was a murderer!

It is scary. It's outrageous to murder a person. Yet it's far worse to forget that you've done it. That's the most horrible thing imaginable!

I did about ten men in three and a half years. Six times, all together, I took part in exercises to improve the technique of medical doctors. Removed brains, testicles. Most doctors did that, in the divisions, or in hospitals, all over China. Yet all keep quiet! Why do they forget? Every body did it. At that time we were doing something good. That's what we let ourselves believe. But they still keep their mouths shut. If they were to recall it, it would be unbearable. That's why they are silent. It was "because of the war." That's enough for them.

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